Cancer Claims Noted Scientist

Russ Heath, who developed a way to identify elements through the radioactive waves they emit, died of lung cancer during the past week. He was 71.

Heath started working at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in 1952 when it was called the National Reactor Test Station. He co-developed a process with Robert Hofstadter, a Nobel laureate from Stanford University, to read invisible gamma rays and wrote a catalog of gamma ray frequencies that scientists still use to identify substances.

The system is called gamma ray spectroscopy, and Heath’s catalog of gamma rays is in the widely used Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

“People here and around the world use it every day,” said Gus Caffrey, a colleague at INEEL whom Heath hired in 1980. “When there’s a puzzle, what people do is pull out Russ Heath’s catalog and try to figure out what they’re looking at.”

Steve Herring, another scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy site and chairman of the Idaho Section of the American Nuclear Society, said he also uses Heath’s methods regularly. Herring works in transporting radionuclides and must know how much shielding is needed around materials to make them safe for storage and shipping.